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Date: 16 May 97 12:49:37 +0100From: Kristi Long <kristi_longgarland.com>Subject: New Book - Syntax

Ferdinand de Haan; The Interaction of Modality and Negation: A
Typological Study; 0-8153-2892-3, cloth; 270 pages, $59; Garland
Publishing; Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics
Based on a wide variety of languages, this study examines the ways in
which modal notions, such as permission and obligation, interact with
negation. In particular, the study focuses on how ambiguities in scope
are resolved. It is shown that languages overwhelmingly make use of
two different strategies. The first strategy (the Modal Suppletion
Strategy) is to use different modal verbs for the different scope
interpretations. This strategy is found in languages such as English,
Finnish, and Tamil. The second strategy (the Negation Placement
Strategy), which is found in French, Russian, and Modern Greek (among
others) is to use two different places for the negation to surface. It
turns out that these two strategies have two different foundations:
the first strategy is a semantic one, while the second strategy is
syntactic in nature. That there is a difference can be shown by
appealing to syntactic tests. The Modal Suppletion Strategy is not
sensitive to these tests, while the Negation Placement Strategy is. It
can also be shown that the two different strategies are correlated
with word order: the Negation Placement Strategy is found exclusively
in languages with a basic SVO order and with a negative morpheme that
precedes the verb. This is checked against a database of 75
languages. Finally, these results are compared to other scope
resolutions in languages.
(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California, 1994; revised
with new introduction, bibliography, and index)
E-mail: infogarland.com